Malaria is a devastating infectious disease, and each year 350-500 million cases occur worldwide. As a major health concern in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America, about 41% of the world's population live in areas where malaria is transmitted. And still more tragically, malaria causes 11% of all children's deaths in developing countries. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that in 2008, malaria caused nearly one million deaths, mostly among African children. In Africa, a child dies every 45 seconds of malaria, and the disease accounts for 20% of all childhood deaths.
Antimalarial treatments, primarily drug therapies, are known. The quinines (or quinoline class), e.g. chloroquine, mefloquine, are well known as therapeutic agents. Other drug combinations have been developed as well. The best currently available treatment, particularly for P. falciparum malaria, is artemisinin-based combination therapy (“ACT”). Artemisinin is derived from a plant, Artemisia annua, which belongs to the Asteraceae family.
Unfortunately, two fundamental problems have arisen in the fight against malaria, namely, drug resistance and the high cost of drugs and medical treatments. There clearly exists an urgent need for alternative therapies that avoid the development of drug resistance by Plasmodium, and drastically lower the costs associated with treating malaria. It would be a contribution to the art of medicine to provide a readily available, easily accessible antimalarial composition administrable in various forms.
According to WHO data, if resistance to artemisinins develops and spreads to other large geographical areas, as has happened before with chloroquine and sulfacoxine-pyrimethamine (SP), the public health consequences could be dire, as it is possible that no alternative antimalarial medicines will be available in the near future.
Furthermore, assuming that the same concentration of the extract from the fruit of Luo Han containing the composition of the present invention is as effective as that of artemisinin derivatives, the cost of the Luo Han extract would be only a fraction of the cost per artemisinin treatment to cure malaria. The same could be said of Stevia leaf-based extracts. Even if a substantially greater amount of the active ingredients derived from Luo Han and/or Stevia were required for antimalarial treatments, the cost savings compared to currently marketed therapies would be immense.
Certain di- and tri-terpene glycosides are known as sweeteners, but there have been no reports of using such compounds for treatment of malaria in a human subject.
It would be a further contribution to the art of medicine to provide a method of treating malaria by administering a composition containing one or more di- or tri-terpene compounds to a human patient in need of such treatment. It would be a further contribution to the art to provide a method of treating drug-resistant malaria by administering to a human patient in need of such treatment an effective amount of the composition of the invention in the form of an extract containing one or more di- or tri-terpene compounds.